Skullgirls Tour Season 2

So, the last year or so was pretty wild. We successfully launched the Skullgirls Tour, and despite bumps on the way we managed to make waves both in and outside of the SGC. We want to come back again this year, and we’ve received support from several external sources to do so, most notably Smash.gg and Stream.me. We’ve turned heads, defined a way smaller games can operate, procured funds, learned a lot, and we have a definite path going forward. So, we are very confident in wanting to set up another year with this effort.

Before moving onto our plans, I’d like to clear some things up. We were focusing so hard on trying to make the Tour successful last season that we hadn’t realized we weren’t explaining ourselves very well to the community. I’ll try to give some better explanations below to go over questions we’ve heard or points we feel weren’t understood. The entire FAQ is confined to the spoiler, if you want to move onto our future plans then feel free to skip it.

FAQ(Move your mouse to reveal the content)FAQ (open)FAQ (close)

What is the Tour trying to be?

In its purest form, the Tour is trying to be a contributor to the Skullgirls community. We want to highlight community effort, we want to ensure our game gets the stream time and tournament handling it deserves, and we want to do our part in allowing the community additional avenues for growth.

The Tour is our way of making sure that anyone who decides to come out to an event for Skullgirls has a good time. We’d like to make sure that no one who joins the community from here on has to know what it’s like not having setups, not having space, and not having fun.

Why use Smash.gg?

They’re helping us a lot. Not only is the Tour page super consolidated, giving anyone who visits it a nice summary of our plans for the year, it features embedded streams (which work with Stream.me) that can feature on the front page of their site. They also release regular newsletters to everyone on their mailing list, which does include Skullgirls events when they’re coming up.

Both of these things mean more awareness to new audiences, which leads to boosted stream views. More stream views means streaming our game is more profitable, which means we’re more likely to get more stream time at offline events.

I don’t like Smash.gg, are you trying to force me to use it at my event?

No. We don’t care if you use a napkin for your brackets. Use whatever you want.

Are you trying to force events to seed based on Tour placings?

No. We don’t really care how anyone seeds their events.

If you aren’t trying to impose them on me, what are the tournament points even for then?

Funsies, mostly. We also would like to give out prizes to high-ranking players, things like covering tourney costs, shipping out merch… idk, buying someone a burger? Additionally, if we get to the point where we have an invitational, we’ll use rankings for that.

Why wasn’t Frosty added last season?

We couldn’t make it happen. By the time we even got the Tour off the ground we had already missed 3 planned Tour events (CEOtaku, GUTS4, and Revo 2017). We were super behind, and we had to move forward with something before any more time passed. It came down to us not having enough time, and we had to choose between Frosty and NWM for events we had the time to support. We did our best for the community, I hope you can understand.

Is Frosty going to be included in the future?

Yeah, it’s in the calendar below.

Why was NCR included last season?

We had community members going to NCR trying to make something happen, so we did our best to support that drive with what we had. We want to support the community in their efforts whenever we can.

Will NCR be included this year?

Nah. If more community effort does appear in the region to try to start something, we’ll have other non-SGTour means of assisting.

So what exactly is going on with Stream.me?

If you missed it, they gave us a bunch of money to send 6 international players to Combo Breaker (one additional player was added through crowdfunding for 7 total). They were happy with how we handled the support they gave us, and they want to continue to support us and the SGC. So… we’re graciously accepting their help! Check our future plans below to see what they're allowing us to do this year.

If anyone wants to stream on their site, there are perks for doing so. They’re willing to support online tournaments hosted there, as well as regular streamers. Now’s probably the best time to hop on the Stream.me boat. DM me if you’re interested in streaming on their site.

Now, we're happy to finally show off some of what we’re planning for the Skullgirls Tour over the next year.

As you see in the announcment, the Tour this year is going to consist of 7 offline events and 7 online events. The offline events are listed below.

For each of those 7 events, we’ll be running online “Road to Skullgirls” events, or RTSG for short, which we touched on in the announcement video above. Essentially, they’ll act as additional promotion for the community and the majors they choose to support. Their exact dates aren’t set yet, but we’ll be releasing that info shortly, so keep an eye on both the tournament section of Skullheart and @SkullgirlsTour on Twitter. The stream we’ll be broadcasting those events on will be Stream.me/SkullgirlsTour, so make sure you follow that channel to get updates.

In addition to the Season 2 calendar, we’d like to announce formally that thanks to Stream.me we’ll be able to provide pot bonuses for every event we just mentioned, both the online RTSG events and their offline Major events. Pot bonuses may vary from event to event, but we’ll announce those when the time comes. We also have some more surprises, but we’ll announce those when plans become more concrete.

i think in the interest of maintaining skullgirls online competitive integrity, skullgirls tour points for online events should only be awarded to player 1 side. there should also be mad pot bonuses for maxout. this message sponsored by fuzzy_snugs

NEC? I thought Big E dropped SG for good. And even if it's back in the lineup again, I just wouldn't expect things to be any different from past shitshows.

The Skullgirls Tour team will directly be handling Skullgirls at NEC to make sure everything runs smoothly. We've talked to Big E, and we'll be announcing a lot of exciting things for NEC after CEOtaku. For now there's nothing to say other than please have patience, we're working very hard to make every event on the Tour great.

Just talked with Big E and we should be having a stage for our tourney and setups provided by the event. They are working on the finalized stream schedule, but I believe we'll be having a Top 16 stream.

They are taking a leap of faith that we can bring the community back to NEC, but if people don't show up we probably won't get this kind of treatment again. Pre-registrations are done a the end of today, if you haven't done that already (pre-reg's help a lot!!)